Email and MailChimp Accessibility

When you use any kind of web service for college related communications, including external services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MailChimp, etc., you are required to follow campus communication standards and rules, including making your content accessibility compliant.

If you are not familiar with accessibility, there are some good resources, including an accessibility primer and a short online accessibility course, available on this website.

One issue to be aware of is that when using MailChimp to send out announcements that are nothing more than a scanned image of a printed flier, MailChimp will render the message so that it seems to be completely blank to someone who is using a screen reader or even a mail client that doesn't show images.  While it is okay to include a scanned image of an event's flier, you must also type out all of the information into the body of the email itself, so that anyone who might use a screen reader can obtain that information.  This is because screen readers cannot extract text out of an image file.

If this seems too redundant, then it may be better to just not send the flier at all, and instead simply type out all of the details and perhaps include an interesting decorative picture or two.